Advice for Canned Wall Street Masses: Learn to Drill, Baby!

Time to start updating your resume if you work on Wall Street, as major job cuts are likely to hit New York’s financial and insurance sectors in thecoming months, according to the Wall Street Journal. The state’s finance and insurance employment numbers have hovered close to 345,000 through August of this year, showing little change in spite of the ongoing meltdown in the financial markets.

But major job cuts loom: Global investment-banking fees have fallen by 23 percent in 2008 and equity capital markets have reverted to levels last seen in 2003. In the wake of the tech crash and 9/11, the city’s securities industry lost 18 percent of its jobs, according to figures from the state Department of Labor, and there is reason to think that the upcoming wave of layoffs will be worse.

So what does this mean for the average Wall Street bum? We’ll let the Journal have the last word on that: “In a global economy characterized by excess financial-services capacity and a deficit of energy sources, enrolling in an engineering course might not be a bad idea.”